1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a data processing system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer program product for managing customer order alterations in a manufacturing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today, customers that buy highly-configurable products may need to make order changes late in the ordering process. Often these changes are requested after production has started on the order. This is referred to as “order alteration”. These complex product configurations can be made up of many custom-built assemblies, hundreds or thousands of parts and may include specific software or customization services as well. An assembly is an item forming a portion of a product that can be provisioned and replaced as an entity and which normally incorporates replaceable parts or groups of parts.
While alterations are usually customer-driven, they can actually originate from both the customer and the company supplying the product. Customer alterations are the most frequent where the ordered product configuration is changed in some way, either hardware, software, or customization specification, from the original order submitted. A customization specification is a special customer specific modification to either hardware or software. For example, painting a customer logo on a product is a customization specification. Other order changes can be driven by the company building the product, such as, for example, in order to avoid delays due to a constrained part or to request a change to fix an incompatibility in the original configuration, or because the sales team made a mistake in translating the customer requirements into an order, and so forth.
Manufacturing applications and tools that support the integration of highly-configurable products, need to have the ability to handle late changes in the most efficient way possible. Simply canceling the order each time and starting over, which is common practice, may not be ideal because of the extra manufacturing time/cost required as well as longer cycle time for the customer shipment. But, in the case of a significant change in the configuration, rebuilding all or part of the product may be more efficient and involve less work than modifying the existing order to match the new configuration. The ability to “weigh” the alternatives and provide the optimum work direction to manufacturing optimizes this process without requiring manual assessment which may be based on an instinct and gut feel that may not be correct. Weighing is the process of assigning a value or cost to performing a particular action for a particular part. A weight is the value assigned to a particular part for a particular action. For example, a logic card may have a weight of five for adding the logic card to a new assembly and a weight of three for removing the logic card from an assembly.
Companies today can handle simple alterations with existing control systems, but cannot automatically handle more complex alterations without starting a new order and manually “mining” the previously-built configuration when building the new one. Mining refers to a manual process of taking parts from the previous work in progress when building the new one. If customers cannot be charged for the additional work, this can affect the profitability of the sales transaction or cause a delay that results in a cancelled order.
With companies moving increasingly complex manufacturing operations to lower-cost geographies, making decisions on how to handle dynamic changes can no longer depend on skills and experience of certain key employees in the manufacturing organization. A supplier that can automatically choose the best course of action to respond to a change request will be able to ship the desired product faster, with less direct labor and inventory costs, which improves customer satisfaction and profitability.